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Sam Finn

Sam Finn

A significant advance in understanding the early evolution of the universe has been achieved by a team of scientists working with the LIGO and Virgo scientific collaborations, including a group led by Lee Samuel Finn, a Penn State professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics, and Benjamin Owen, a Penn State professor of physics. The research has put new constraints on the details of how the universe looked in its earliest moments and has discovered the most stringent limits yet on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang.

Einstein's 1916 theory of general relativity predicted that some objects in space produce such intense gravitational fields that nothing —not even light—can escape them. Ergo, the black hole. But while the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have helped identify more than 30 possible black holes, scientists have yet to provide direct proof of their existence.